CoNLL-2012, to be held jointly with EMNLP in conjunction with ACL (Jeju,
Korea, 12-14 July 2012), will continue the tradition of including a shared
task for natural language learning systems. The 2012 shared task will
target the modeling of coreference resolution for multiple languages. The
importance of the latter for the entity/event detection task, namely
identifying all mentions of entities and events in text and clustering
them into equivalence classes, has been well recognized in the natural
language processing community. Automatic identification of coreferring
entities and events in text has been an uphill battle for several decades,
partly because it can require world knowledge which is not well-defined
and partly owing to the lack of substantial annotated data.

The OntoNotes project (http://www.bbn.com/ontonotes/) -- a collaborative
effort between BBN Technologies, University of Colorado, University of
Southern California (ISI), University of Pennsylvania and Brandeis
University -- created a large-scale, accurate multilingual corpus for
general anaphoric coreference that covers entities and events not limited
to noun phrases or a limited set of entity types. The Linguistic Data
Consortium (LDC) has agreed to make it freely available to the research
community. The coreference layer in OntoNotes constitutes one part of a
multi-layer, integrated annotation of shallow semantic structure in text
with high inter-annotator agreement. In addition to coreference, this data
is also tagged with syntactic trees, high coverage verb and some noun
propositions, partial verb and noun word senses, and rich set of named
entity types.

Modeling multilingual unrestricted coreference in the OntoNotes data is
the shared task for CoNLL-2012. This is an extension of the CoNLL-2011
shared task and would involve automatic anaphoric mention detection and
coreference resolution across three languages -- English, Chinese and
Arabic -- using OntoNotes v5.0 corpus, given predicted information on the
syntax, proposition, word sense and named entity layers. The training data
will contain both gold standard and predicted annotations, but only
predicted annotations will be provided with the test material. The English
and Chinese language portion comprises roughly one million words per
language from newswire, magazine articles, broadcast news, broadcast
conversations, web data and conversational speech. The English corpus also
contains a further 200k of the English translation of the New Testament.
The Arabic portion is smaller, comprising 300k of newswire articles.

The evaluation will follow CoNLL-2011's strategy. The score for each
language will be determined by computing the unweighted average across the
MUC, BCUBED, and CEAF metrics. The introduction of two new languages in
the shared task offers a unique opportunity to carry out research in new
contexts of coreference resolution and derive more general findings, which
go beyond the monolingual (English) setting. Given the multilingual focus
of this shared task, the winner will be determined by aggregating the
scores across all languages. Although the participants are not required
to work with all three languages, they are strongly encouraged to work
with at least two languages and one of them could be English. Systems
will be penalized with a null score for the languages that are left out.
In addition, the review process of the shared task will favorably consider
papers reporting experiments in a multilingual settings.

December 30, 2012: Registration begins
January 22, 2012: Trial Data available
February 10, 2012: Registration deadline
February 19, 2012: Training and development set available
April 22, 2012: Test set available
April 26, 2012: System outputs collected
April 29, 2012: System results due to participants
May 6, 2012: System papers due
May 15, 2012: Reviews back to authors
May 22, 2012: Camera ready papers due